Ten flags in Shanghai

Political and economic considerations have weighed in deciding membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

Dmitri Kosyrev Shanghai

Three things struck a prominent Russian participant in the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Shanghai: ten banners displayed at the entrance; a very responsible and non-belligerent Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad; and the generally businesslike mood of all the participants.

Each of the facts mentioned hide not just double but multiple meanings.

Let us start with the national flags. The closest analogue to the SCO is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is hardly surprising, as the anonymous people credited with the concept of SCO tailored it after that  regional organisation. But ASEAN, after its 39 years of existence, has a well-structured system of core membership, summit partners and dialogue partners. On the other hand, SCO has six full-scale members (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrghizia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia), and four observer countries (India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan). Practically, all the four observers have expressed a desire – repeated at the Shanghai summit – to become a full-scale member.

But the least that can be said about the mood of the six full-scale SCO members regarding the enlargement of their ranks is "not now". This was unanimously manifested at the Russian foreign minister's meeting in Shanghai a month ago, ironing out the summit's agenda. “Maybe never” was perhaps an extreme idea voiced by mainly the Kazakhs at the closed door meeting of experts in Moscow, where only Russian and Kazakh officials took part. "Never say never", their colleagues responded, begging anonymity.

The reason for all of this is that smaller and weaker SCO members, Kyrghizia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan perhaps are apprehensive of being sidelined and neglected within the organisation, if too many big boys join in. The word "neglected" smells strongly of money. If you are a Russian or a Chinese political strategist who thinks that the main reason for SCO’s existence is blocking the US out of Central Asia, then all you need is to have all the 10 participants in – and a dozen or more above that. But if you are a Tajik or Uzbek, then you will probably have to keep in mind that security is only one of many goals of the organisation, whose primary goal is the economic development of Central Asia.

SCO’s bureaucracy has been clogged with documents of late, with the economic plans becoming the victim. There are plainly too many plans in the pipeline that SCO’s secretariat in Beijing just cannot handle properly. The addition of new members not only means additional paperwork but also reworking the economic plan. For such reasons, a decision to give the secretariat additional powers was taken at the Shanghai summit. The chair passed from China to Kazakhstan with the Kazakh SCO secretary-general expected to move things forward decisively.

We will come back to economic plans later on, but in the meantime we just have to be honest and confess that the "not now" faction has merged with the "maybe never" faction in stating that political considerations may be equally important when the enlargement of the membership is decided upon.